Ava's Man (4 page)

Newt, stooped and gray and gnarly, was much too old to fist-fight a man in his own house. So he reached into his overalls pocket, fished out his pocketknife and flicked out a blade long enough to cut watermelon.

Ava took one look at that knife and flung her body across her husband, to shield him. Then she looked up at Newt, and when she spoke there were spiders and broken glass in her voice.

“Don’t you touch him,” she hissed.

Everybody has a moment like it. If they never did, they never did love nobody, truly. People who have lived a long, long time say it, so it must be so.

They never spoke about it. They never had another moment like it again. They fought—my Lord, did they fight—for thirty years, until the children were mostly grown and gone. But they stuck. You go through as much as they did, you stick. I have seen old people do it out of spite, as if growing old together was some sweet revenge. Charlie and Ava did not get to grow old together. What they got was life condensed, something richer and sweeter and—yes—more bitter and violent, life with the dull moments just boiled or scorched away.

She never bowed to him, and he never made her, and they lived that way, in the time they had.

Every now and then, they would jab a little. She would stand over her new dishpan and recite a little poem as she gently rinsed her iron skillet and biscuit pans:

He would pretend not to hear. And bide his time, to get even.

“Daddy,” Margaret would ask him when she was still a little girl, “how come you haven’t bought us a radio?”

Charlie would just shake his head.

“Hon, we don’t need no radio,” he would say, and then he would point one of his long, bony fingers at Ava. “I already got a walkie-talkie.”

And on and on it went, them pretending, maybe out of pride, that they did not love each other, and need each other, as much as they did.

As time dragged on they would break out the banjo—Charlie was hell-hot on a banjo—and the guitar, which Ava played a lifetime. And in the light of an old kerosene lantern, as the children looked on from their beds, they would duel.

Charlie would do “Doin’ My Time”—his commentary on marriage—and grin while she stared hard at him from behind her spectacles:

Then Ava would answer with “Wildwood Flower” or something like it:

And Charlie would sing back at her with another song, about being on a chain gang, or doing time in a Yankee prison, or “All the Good Times Are Past and Gone”:

Or “Knoxville Girl”:

But it always ended in dancing, somehow. He would beat those banjo strings and she would buck-dance around the kitchen, her skirts in her hands, her heavy shoes smacking into the boards, and
the children would laugh, because it is impossible not to when your momma acts so young.

Much, much later, when she had passed seventy, she still played and she still sang but she could not really see how to tune her guitar, and her hand shook too much to do it right, anyway. She would miss a lick now and then, and she would always frown at what time had done to her. But she never forgot the words.

It didn’t all start there, of course, with the beating of that unfortunate woman. The beginning of their story goes way, way back, beyond them, even beyond the first Bundrum to drift here, to these green foothills that straddle the Alabama-Georgia border. In it, I found not only the beginnings of a family history but a clue to our character.

All my life, I have heard the people of the foothills described as poor, humble people, and I knew that was dead wrong. My people were, surely, poor, but they were seldom humble. Charlie sure wasn’t, and his daddy wasn’t, and I suspect that his daddy’s daddy wasn’t humble a bit. And Ava, who married into that family, was no wilting flower, either. A little humility, a little meekness of spirit, might have
spared us some pain, over the years, but the sad truth is, it’s just not in us. With the exception of my own mother, maybe, it never was.

For a family so often poor, we have, for a hundred years or more, refused to adapt our character very much. But then, if we had been willing to change just a little bit, we never would have gotten here in the first place.

We are here because our ancestors were too damn hardheaded to adapt, to assimilate. We are here because someone with a name very much like Bundrum picked a fight with the King of France, and the Church of Rome.

I
was near a fish camp on the Coosa backwater near Leesburg, on the road by Yellow Creek Falls, when I saw my first real buck dance. It was not quite dark, but some fishermen had built a big campfire beside the river and heaved a truck tire on top of it to repel the skeeters. I remember how the oily smoke from the tire wafted over the cattails, how the water had gone black as ink, how glad I was that I was not swimming in it anymore. The tips of spinning rods sprouted from the back of one man’s truck, and the doors were wide open, making it easier to hear the radio. It was country, or maybe bluegrass, reedy and scratchy from the speaker, and it serenaded them as they showed off stringers of crappie. It was a scene I had seen so many times that, even though I was still a boy, I almost didn’t see it at all. The men had a bottle, and some beer pulled from the same Styrofoam ice chest as the fish, and I stood in the empty parking lot of a bait shop and watched them as I waited for my momma to come out so we could go home. The most I could hope
for, I thought as I chunked rocks into the cattails, was to hear some cuss words from the men I had never heard before. Drinking always leads to cussing. Fishing does, too. Or maybe it is merely the absence of wives.

I got a better show than that. One of the men, gaunt, bent and ancient, began to pound on his leg with one fist in rough time to that music. Then, as old, drunk men will, he commenced to dance.

But I had never seen a dance like this. It was not rhythmic, not fluid. The old man stomped hard at the gravel, then shuffled a bit before stomping down hard again, as if he was trying to stamp out fires or snakes. And as he danced he clutched a jelly glass filled with what had to be likker in his hand, and I thought it sure was dumb, because he would only wind up spilling it all over himself. But it was only the bottom part of that old man that was in motion. He held the rest of his body still as a cement angel, his head back, his arms at his sides, as his legs, as if unbidden, did the work. It scared me a little bit.

But it was just buck dancing, about the only kind of dancing my people did. There were no reels, no shags, just this. Folklorists trace it to Ireland and Wales and other places, and it became, over time, the odd ballet that I saw on a riverbank not far from the falls, the stench of burning tires in the wind. I cannot recall the tune, but I can still see that old man banging his bootheels together, spinning, stomping. It was to gentler dancing what a hurtling freight train is to a buggy ride, and it belongs to us, just us. We don’t even know how to do it anymore, but it’s ours.

Charlie Bundrum was a buck dancer. He had danced it happy, with his work boots skillfully avoiding the tiny feet of laughing girls. And he had danced it sad, lit by a campfire and fresh out of whiskey as his hunting buddy plucked a tune on a Jew’s harp. He knew the steps, but he could not have told you where they came from, where they led.

Charlie could not read. His daddy could not read, and his daddy’s daddy could not. There were no old family Bibles in their attics, no giant leather-bound books in which people scribbled an entire family history, listing births, deaths, marriages, war records, baptisms and all the rest. I have seen those books, other people’s, littered with yellowed birth certificates, faded blue 4-H Club ribbons and tendrils of lace from hundred-year-old wedding gowns. I always had the feeling that if I shook those Bibles hard enough, the darker, more secret histories would flutter out, too.